If you haven’t done so already, you may want to start by reading the Preface to Knowledge Engineering & Emerging Technologies.
January 31st, 2024 (4th ed)
The aim of this article is to encourage you to take an end-to-end perspective in your designs, seeking to minimize the overall complexity of your system, of the hardware-software-user combination. To achieve this, it is helpful to understand how computing, and within that, how the notions of the sacred and the profane have evolved over the past 60 or so years.
The following remarks set out a ‘true north’ perspective for this conversation:
- “We are reaching the stage of development where each new generation of participants is unaware both of their overall technological ancestry and the history of the development of their speciality, and have no past to build upon.” – J.A.N. Lee, [Lee, 1996, p.54].
- “Any [one] can make things bigger, more complex. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage, to move in the opposite direction.” – Ernst F. Schumacher, 1973, from “Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered”.
- “The goal [is] simple: to minimize the complexity of the hardware-software combination. [Apart from] some lip service perhaps, no-one is trying to minimize the complexity of anything and that is of great concern to me.” – Chuck Moore, [Moore, 1999] (For a succinct introduction to Chuck Moore’s minimalism, see Less is Moore by Sam Gentle, [Gentle, 2015]
- “The arc of change is long, but it bends towards simplicity”, paraphrasing Martin Luther King.
The discussion requires a familiarity with lower-level computing, i.e. computing that is close to the underlying hardware. If you already have some familiarity with this, you can jump straight in to section 2. For all backgrounds, the discussions in the Interlude (section 4) make for especially enlightening reading. Whether you find yourself in violent agreement or disagreement, your perspective is welcomed in the comments!
 Between complexity and simplicity, progress, and new layers of abstraction. Continue reading this article…
TinyPhoto is a small rotating photobook embedded graphics project that uses the low-power ATtiny85 microcontroller (3mA) and a 128×64 pixel OLED display (c.5-10mA typical, 15mA max). This combination can deliver at least 20 hrs of continuous play on a 3V coin cell battery (225mAh capacity). TinyPhoto can be readily built from a handful of through-hole electronic components (12 parts, £5) organized to fit onto a 3cm x 7cm single-sided prototype PCB. The embedded software is c.150 lines of C code and uses less than 1,300 bytes of on-chip memory. TinyPhoto rotates through five user-selectable images using a total of 4,900 bytes (yes, bytes!) stored in the on-chip flash RAM. The setup produces crisp photos on the OLED display with a real-time display rate that is instantaneous to the human eye with the Tiny85 boosted to run at 8MHz. A custom device driver (200 bytes) sets up the OLED screen and enables pixel-by-pixel display. Custom Forth code converts a 0-1 color depth image into a byte-stream that can be written to the onboard flash for rapid display. It is a reminder of what can be accomplished with low-fat computing…
The magic, of course, is in the software. This article describes how this was done, and the software that enables it. Checkout the TinyPhoto review on Hackaday!
 Tiny Photo – 3cm x 7cm photo viewer powered by ATTiny85 8-bit microcontroller sending pixel level image data to OLED display (128×64 pixels), powered by 3V coin cell battery. Cycles through 5 images stored in 5kB of on-chip Flash RAM. (Note, this is 1 million times less memory than on a Windows PC with 8GB RAM). The magic is in the software. Continue reading this article…
*New!* (29 Aug 2020) – Turtle Logo v1.8 (portable) is available! Developer kit with source code included. Suitable from ages 3 years to adult. (970 lines of Forth code).
1. Inspiring the next generation of technology builders.
A challenge facing parents and teachers is how to help children develop ‘builder’ relationships with technology rather than being limited to the passive consumption of content created by others. The consensus on what’s important for older kids and adults is clear: coding. This enables children to participate in the creation of their own technological “micro-worlds” — environments rich in educational potential.[14]
This autumn, spurred by having our own young children (one aged 4 years, the other 16 months), we began an experiment, the result of which is a Turtle Logo program for Windows computers (freely downloadable) that is simple enough to be accessible for children from 3 years and older, while providing an extensible platform that can grow with the child.
The long-term goal is to enable children to express their creativity, artistry, and natural ‘builder’ impulses using coding, computer graphics, and robotics as readily as the previous generation could using paints, brushes, and building blocks.
 Turtle Logo – Inspiring the next generation of technology builders. Continue reading this article…
By Assad Ebrahim, on November 15th, 2010 (11,551 views) |
Topic: Maths--Data Science
(Statistics and Data Mining II)
Automated decision problems are frequently encountered in statistical data processing and data mining. An heuristic filter or heuristic classifier typically has a limited set of input data from which to arrive at a set of conclusions and make a decision: REJECT, ACCEPT, or UNDETERMINED. In such cases, pre-processing the input data before applying the heuristic classifier can substantially enhance the performance of the decision system.
In this article, I’ll motivate the use of a radar-tracking algorithm to improve the performance of automated decision making and statistical estimation in data processing. I will illustrate using the website visitation statistics problem.
Continue reading this article…
By Assad Ebrahim, on September 3rd, 2010 (16,288 views) |
Topic: Maths--Data Science
(Statistics and Data Mining I)
For a variety of reasons, meaningful website visitation and visitor behavior statistics are an elusive data set to generate. This article introduces the visitor statistics problem, and describes seven challenges that must be overcome by statistical and data analysis techniques aiming for accurate estimates. Along the way, we’ll encounter the “Good News Cheap, Bad News Expensive” Paradox of Data Mining — or, why information is often used “as-is”.
This article is the first in a series on algorithms, statistics and data analysis techniques (using free and open source tools) using the visitor statistics problem as a vehicle for illustration.
Continue reading this article…
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